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HISTORICAL PAPERS 



RELATING TO THE 



HENRY WHITFIELD HOUSE 

GUILFORD, CONNECTICUT 



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HISTORICAL PAPERS 



RELATING TO THE 



HENRY WHITFIELD HOUSE 

GUILFORD, CONNECTICUT 



Reprinted by Vote of the Trustees 



am 

Fubll*i..,»- 
SEP V Iff, 






THE TUTTLE, MOREHOUSE & TAYLOR PRESS. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



Introductory ^ 

The Henry Whitfield House and the State Historical 

Museum ' 

Guilford Among her Neighbors • • ■ • 27 

The Colonial Minister 32 

The Character of Henry Whitfield 36 

Two Medical Worthies Guilford Knew in Former Days- • • 53 

Trustees ^^ 



INTRODUCTORY. 

The following papers have been printed before in two different 
pamphlets and are here reproduced together on account of their 
common historical character. A smaller pamphlet, "The Henry- 
Whitfield House," of which a second edition was issued about 
two years ago, covers part of the same ground and gives a few 
additional details. 

The first and longest article is taken by the kind permission of 
the New Haven Colony Historical Society from the seventh 
volume of the Society's "Papers," though somewhat abbreviated. 
The other four come from the "Proceedings at the Formal 
Opening of the State Historical Museum, 1904." Much interest- 
ing matter in the last-named pamphlet is omitted, as relating 
rather to the "Opening" than to the story of the House. 

The manuscripts follow^ed in printing were furnished by the 
various writers, who are alone responsible for their historical 
accuracy. The ground plan and perpendicular section of the 
original fireplace were kindly sent by the architect who designed 
the exhibition-room, Mr. Norman M. Isham of Provi- 
dence. Attention is called to the note following Mrs. Cheney's 
paper, which contains additional information of much interest 
concerning Whitfield. It may be noticed that as the State His- 
torical Museum is in the Henry Whitfield House, the former 
name is sometimes used to designate the building. 

It seems worth while to add a brief account of the view show- 
ing approximately the "supposed appearance of the exterior" 
of the House when the Whitfields lived in it, since this view is 
referred to in the first paper as possessing a kind of authority. 
We are indebted for this cut to Mr. Charles H. Scholey of the 
Guilford Shore Line Times. It is based on a drawing made by the 
late IMyron B. Benton of Amenia, N, Y., in 1862. This draw- 
ing appeared as a steel engraving (with a short article from Mr. 
Benton's pen), in the Ladies Repository for June, 1863. The 
engraving was photographed, and from the photograph in 1890 
a picture was made on a tile by the late Miss Harriet Day 



6 INTRODUCTORY 

Andrews of Hartford. Her object was, first, to show the stone 
structure substantially as it was in 1862 when Mr. Benton drew 
it. To this end two modern additions of wood (one a mere 
shed) were omitted, and a door and a window, concealed by the 
smaller addition, were introduced. The position of these was 
obtained from plans prepared, it would seem, about 1859 (^^ least 
three years before Mr. Benton's visit), by Hon. Ralph D. Smith 
for Palfrey's History of New England and afterwards inserted 
in Mr. Smith's History of Guilford. There can be no reasonable 
doubt that the representation is accurate to this point. But with 
the object of reproducing still more nearly the appearance of the 
House as it was when Mr. Whitfield left it, the window first men- 
tioned and a smaller one were drawn with diamond panes, such as 
persons living in the middle of the last century could remember. 
The old windows, however, according to our architect, were much 
smaller than those remaining in Mr. Smith's day, though possibly 
the two seen close to the eaves and since removed are original. 
Furthermore, the stucco on the outer walls, first put there, prob- 
ably, not far from 1820 and renewed in 1868, and which it is 
not quite clear whether Mr. Benton intended to show, is frankly 
omitted on the tile. Thus the far more picturesque surface of 
seventeenth century colonial masonry, built up of "rather small 
flat stones," principally quarried, one fancies, by the frost, is 
at least indicated. Mr. Benton's own enjoyment of picturesque 
effects is shown in his rejection of "the ordinary point of view" 
from the street. His taste went far to save from oblivion the 
very striking east chimney then destined soon to disappear. 

W. G. A. 



THE HENRY WHITFIELD HOUSE AND THE 
STATE HISTORICAL MUSEUM. 

By Rev. William G. Andrews, D.D. 

(Read before the New Haven Colony Historical Society, December 19, 
1904, and here abbreviated.) 

Rather more than a year ago a mass of blackened stonework 
was brought to hght in Guilford which I suppose nobody had 
seen for more, perhaps much more, than a hundred years. It 
is, in the opinion of the architect and archaeologist who super- 
intended what we may call the excavation, "the oldest fireplace 
in New England,"* and opens into the north chimney of the 
Henry Whitfield house. In front of it and effectually conceal- 
ing it were two other fireplaces ; one had been in existence for 
a generation, and one, or its ruins, for no one knows how long, 
certainly since the latter part of the eighteenth century. 

Now how do we knoiv that what we call the Whitfield house 
is really that which Henry Whitfield lived in ? How do we knozv 
that his house, whether this one or another, was built in 1640, or 
before? How do we knozv that some other settler, somewhere 
else, did not, as he easily might, build a house, part or even the 
whole of which still stands, years before this can have been 
built, so that our priceless fireplace is perhaps not the oldest in 
New England? 

As to the question of identity, that is soon disposed of. There 
are, in the first place, deeds and wills running back from 1900 
to 1659, when Whitfield's son, Nathaniel, sold what had been 
his father's New England residence, and alone proving the iden- 
tity of that with the "old stone house" of Guilford.* But we 
have also the testimony of Rev. Thomas Ruggles, junior, a 
native of Guilford, and an industrious questioner of children 
and grandchildren of the settlers, given while the property still 

* This opinion, it will be observed, relates only to the fireplace with, 
I suppose, the greater part of the chimney. Houses are often older than 
their present chimneys. 



8 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

belonged to the family which bought it of the Whitfields (1769), 
that Whitfield's house was then standing. And we have the 
testimony of the Massachusetts Historical Society, given when 
the property had passed to the owner whose descendants held 
it until 1900, that the same house had meanwhile been "hand- 
somely repaired."* The identity is beyond question, even if it 
only extends to the fireplace and part of the chimney. 

But when, precisely, did Henry Whitfield build the house, 
or, at any rate, the chimney? It needs no contemporaneous 
documents, testifying explicitly to the date of erection, to prove 
that the date is earlier than 1650, v/hen, as such documents 
prove, Mr. Whitfield left Guilford finally. It needs no contem- 
poraneous papers to prove that he built his house, like other 
settlers, as soon as possible after the town was settled, and docu- 
ments amply prove that Guilford was settled in 1639, and that 
the settlers, with Henry Whitfield at their head, had begun to 
occupy the lands in some v/ay "as planters" before September 
twenty-ninth of that year, when the formal transfer was made 
by the Indians. They had probably already built some tempo- 
rary houses or cabins to shelter them during the winter, and 
those who could do so must have completed more permanent 
houses in the course of the next year. Mr. Whitfield, the richest 
of the planters, with a wife and eight or nine children, had no 
doubt substantially finished his stone house in 1640, though we 
are assured that it could not have been finished in 1639. But 
since it was intended, according to Mr. Ruggles, that is accord- 
ing to the children and grandchildren of the settlers, to serve 
as a fort, and such a defense of the settlement v/ould be secured 
as early as it could be, it is hard not to believe that it was begun 
in 1639, and so far finished that it could be used as a place of 
refuge in case of attack, and could be made a comfortable abode 
for Mr. Whitfield and one of his sons, or some friends, until 
spring. And during the recent changes already referred to a 
break was found in the west or front wall of the cellar which 
suggested to the architect that two parts of that wall had per- 
haps been built at two different times. And on the east 
side of the house a vertical joint, discovered where the north 

* Ruggles' "History of Guilford," Collections of Massachusetts His- 
torical Society, ist series, vols, iv and x. 



WHITFIELD HOUSE AND HISTORICAL MUSEUM 9 

wall of the wing or ell met the wall of the front part near 
the north end of the house, and signs of plaster on the latter 
behind the end of the other wall, suggested that the ell was 
built later than the front part. On these grounds the architect 
thinks it "somewhat" likely that the house was at first a 
single room. It might have been a square structure with the 
south end filled in with timbers, while the great north fire- 
place made it habitable. We cannot affirm positively that this 
fireplace and the adjoining walls date from 1639, but several 
facts point that way and create a strong probability that that 
is the true date. That the house, as a whole, was finished in 
1640 is fairly well proved. 

But is the Whitfield house the oldest in New England, or 
as has often been affirmed, in the United States? It seems 
impossible to be sure that it is, unless one can know the age of 
all the oldest houses in the country (leaving out of considera- 
tion the much earlier Spanish settlements), and that, I fear, 
we can never know. A very partial inquiry gives, however, 
a result interesting as far as it goes. In Virginia no dwelling 
house now standing is known to have been built before 1654. 
In Rhode Island one house is variously assigned to 1640 and 
1639, making it as old as ours. But good authorities think 
this assignment less than probable; that house is "possibly" 
as old. In Massachusetts there are, or were not long ago, 
about a dozen houses for which a date earlier than 1640 is 
claimed, and there is an antecedent probability that such claims 
can rightfully be made in territory settled nearly twenty years 
before Guilford. And yet it does not appear that any one of 
these dates has been so conclusively established as to be accepted 
by local historical students as a body. That is, it seems that 
the precise dates depend on tradition only. At least that is 
the only inference which I can draw from what I have learned 
about the matter. It remains entirely possible, if not probable, 
that Massachusetts does now contain dwellings older than the 
Whitfield house;* it is possible that there are such in Virginia, 
settled in 1607. But it seems fair to say that in the three States 
mentioned there are none for which a date as early has been so 
nearly proved. I believe that as much could have been said if 

* Our architect thinks that the Roger Williams House in Salem is older. 



lO HISTORICAL PAPERS 

the inquiry had been extended to other States of Enghsh origin 
as long settled as Connecticut. 

Before dealing with the question as to the probable appear- 
ance of the house in Whitfield's time, it is better to say some- 
thing of the changes known or believed to have been made during 
the long interval, now approaching two centuries and three- 
quarters, with a brief mention of the owners who made them. 
The story of the successive owners is an interesting one and 
enriches the house itself with some memorable associations, but 
I can give little more than names and dates. 

Mr. Whitfield died in England, in 1657, leaving his Guilford 
property to his wife, Dorothy Sheaffe. When their son, 
Nathaniel, sold it for his mother two years later (1659), the 
purchaser was Major Robert Thompson, a Puritan merchant 
of London, who had become also a landowner, and who is to-day 
represented by his descendant, Sir Francis Astley-Corbett, 
owner of Major Thompson's country house, Elsham Hall, in 
Lincolnshire. Four descendants in the male line, all living in 
England, held the property until 1772, when another Robert 
Thompson sold it to Wyllys Eliot of Guilford, a fictitious law- 
suit in New Haven being necessary to break the entail. The 
house itself belonged to Mr. Eliot (of the family of the famous 
apostle to the Indians, still represented in Guilford and else- 
Vv^here) less than a fortnight, and was sold in November, 1772, 
to Joseph Pynchon, the solitary owner, after Whitfield, who 
ever lived in it ; it is, therefore, a "Pynchon House" by a 
much better title than the "House of the Seven Gables." In 
1776, Mr. Pynchon sold it to Jasper Griffing of Guilford, with 
whose descendants it remained until the sale to the State of 
Connecticut in 1900. The last individual owner, Mrs. Sarah 
Brown Cone of Stockbridge, descends from a first cousin of 
Mrs. Whitfield's, Joanna Sheaffe, the wife of William Chitten- 
den, and therefore shares the blood of the first mistress and 
second owner.* 

In indicating the changes which have made the house 
what it is, I follow a guide to whom I have already referred, 
the architect who planned and carefully watched the latest 
changes, whom I may now introduce as Mr. Norman M. Isham 

* Mrs. Cone died Nov. 9, 1909. 



WHITFIELD HOUSE AND HISTORICAL MUSEUM II 

of Providence, and to whom my obligations are greater than I 
can easily tell you. In a book on "Early Connecticut Houses," 
of which he was one of the authors, and which some of you 
probably know, he assigns by conjecture to one of the Thomp- 
sons, near the beginning of the eighteenth century, the division 
by a floor and partitions of a long, high hall, of which tradition 
makes the whole front part of the house to have consisted 
originally, and which Mr. Isham is strongly inclined to believe 
in. It is likely to have been divided very early by a floor, and 
just such a change had been made in a multitude of such halls 
in England in the sixteenth century. This change may have 
been Major Thompson's ovv^n contribution to the convenience 
and comfort of his American tenants. Another Thompson very 
likely removed in the eighteenth century a chimney which there 
is good reason to believe stood in the beginning at the south 
end of the hall but which did not exist forty years ago. This 
removal was made, doubtless, to render it possible to put win- 
dows into the south upper room and perhaps the attic, but the 
south wall was weakened by doing it. Almost certainly after 
Jasper Grifling became owner repairs were made which may 
have included the building of a second fireplace at the north end, 
in front of the old one. Early in the nineteenth century the 
outer wall was plastered. Finally, in 1868, during the owner- 
ship of Mrs. Cone's mother, Mrs. Chittenden, when the house 
had become uninhabitable, and at least the south wall was 
insecure, it was largely rebuilt. This was done to save it, and 
those most concerned earnestly desired to preserve everything 
that was capable of preservation. The extent of the changes, 
however, has been variously stated and there has long been 
a strong desire to know positively how much of the old work 
was left, a desire which it was hoped that the late changes would 
to some extent gratify. The latest fireplace in the north chim- 
ney was now introduced and the south chimney was restored. 
A sad loss, apparently inevitable, was that of the old roof, the 
curious construction of which, as far as can be inferred, might 
have been intended to provide gables in front, containing win- 
dows for the original garret, otherwise quite in darkness. 

The observations made by Mr. Isham, in 1903, was limited 
by the object then in view. This was not to solve problems. 



12 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

but to provide a convenient room for the principal collections of 
the Museum, of course without injury to what was most precious 
of them all, the remnants of the original house. Less was 
learned than had been hoped, therefore, about the building as it 
was at first and about the portion which remained after 1868. 

The most interesting results concerned the fireplace and 
chimney, which, if I understand my guide, were probably 
unique in New England in virtue of two or three features 
which have survived on the other side of the Atlantic. One 
of them is shown in plans of Shakespeare's birthplace, and 
consists of two pilaster-like buttresses, one on either side of the 
wide opening of the fireplace, and each extending backwards 
two feet from the opening and projecting into it, one a little 
less, the other a little more, than one foot. They must have 
borne part of the weight of the huge timber lintel or mantel- 
tree (long since removed and then bearing marks of fire) on 
which the masonry forming the front of the chimney rested. 
And a mass of new masonry, now covered by panelling and 
approximately a rude triangle, indicated the space from which 
the old work had fallen. Another peculiar feature, such as is 
seen in photographs of old English fireplaces, is a depression 
in the back of the chimney four and a half feet wide and twelve 
inches deep, beginning about thirty inches above the present 
floor, and disappearing nine or ten feet higher, through the 
gradual contraction of the flue to the width of the depression. 
Finally, it was found that the chimney contained two flues, 
the partition beginning seven or eight feet above the hearth. 
These were inserted, Mr. Isham believes, to carry off the smoke 
from two small fires to be built, one or both, in mild weather at 
opposite ends of the fireplace, where was found, beneath each 
flue, an iron bar for supporting pots and kettles. In cold weather 
a single fire, as large as might be needed, would be served as 
well by two flues as by one. Once more there is European 
precedent for at least part of this arrangement, since in the 
middle ages there were sometimes two fireplaces in the same 
chimney and in the same room. 

This fireplace is farther noticeable for the disproportion 
between its length, ten feet and four inches, and its height, not 
quite four feet; the former making it easier to have two small 



WHITFIELD HOUSE AND HISTORICAL MUSEUM I 3 

fires, the latter easier to supply a sufficient draft for them, or 
for one large one, and so lessening the danger of a smoky chim- 
ney. The eye is at once struck by another peculiarity, of 
modern origin, the raising of the present floor about eight inches 
above the ancient hearth. This took place, for the most part, 
in 1868, when a new floor had to be laid and the whole building 
was made higher. There would have seemed no reason for 
keeping the floor on a level with a fireplace which had long been 
not only out of use but out of sight. In making the final 
changes, now finished, the construction of another and lower 
floor would have been too costly and the surface was simply 
rendered even by being covered with oak, and at the north end 
was two inches higher than before. The difference in height 
at least emphasized the characteristics of the ancient fireplace 
and it was more important to show that as nearly as possi- 
ble in its original condition than to bring modern work into 
conformity with it.* 

It is proper to add that the ruins of a brick oven were found 
on the left, or east side of the fireplace, but this is supposed 
to have been introduced by Jasper Griffing towards the close 
of the eighteenth century. Of greater consequence are marks 
which seem to indicate a fireplace on the level of the second 
floor. If this is original it shows that this floor was in existence 
from the beginning and that the tradition of a high hall must 
be given up. But Mr. Ishani does not believe the upper fire- 
place to have been built at that early period, but to have been 
constructed when the second floor was built. 

Mr. Isham is certain that a section of from four to eight feet 
at the top of the chimney consists of modern work. We are told 
that the walls of the house, originally fifteen feet high, were 
raised two and a half feet in 1868, and the chimney would 
naturally have been raised as much as the walls, or more. A 
comparison of pictures taken before and after that date seems 
to show that the chimney rises higher above the roof than was 
once the case. It is, moreover, reasonable to assume that the 
old top needed repairs and so we can explain the new work with- 
out assuming that much of the old work has disappeared. There 

* A plan of the fireplace, with a vertical section, will be found at the 
close of this paper. 



14 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

is, in fact, no doubt that not only the fireplace but the larger part 
of the chimney are what they were when first built. And what 
they then were in general character has long been visible from 
without at a point where the stucco has fallen from the chimney, 
showing the old masonry. This consists, in Mr. Isham's words, 
"of rather small flat stones, with large mortar joints," and 
the old masonry inside is of the same description, as far as it 
has been uncovered. In fact it was not the nature but the 
extent of what remains of the original structure which most 
of us have particularly desired to ascertain. This could only 
be done by the removal of the plaster, and it was impossible 
to remove enough to settle the question without diverting money 
given for the construction of an exhibition room from its desig- 
nated purpose. The north wall was exposed by the side of and 
above the fireplace to a point somewhat higher than the second 
floor. Except for the triangular space already mentioned as 
directly over the fireplace, what was laid bare was old, as was 
expected. A large part of this wall adjoining the chimney 
may fairly be supposed to be original, with allowance made, of 
course, for what may have been added at the top when the walls 
were heightened. The east or rear wall extends but a few feet, 
ending with the wing or ell, or rather with what was a small 
room in the reentrant angle, which might have been a stairwell 
and which occupied the place of the present stairs. The little 
work that was uncovered in the east wall seemed old, and rela- 
tively old work was found near the angle in the wall of the wing. 
The west wall, or that facing the street, Vv^as uncovered only at 
the front door, and on the line of the second floor when that was 
removed. In neither place does old masonry seem to have been 
found. It may, nevertheless, exist below the level of the second 
floor. Such testimony as has been obtained about the changes 
made in 1868 is conflicting, but it is on the whole to the effect 
that as much as half of the ancient wall was not disturbed, the 
larger part of that being to the north of the door. But if the 
architect saw no old work above the level of the second floor, 
and some new work below it, w^e seem forced to the conclusion 
that less of the west wall is original than had been supposed, 
though some of it may be presumed to be so. Of the south 
wall, Mr. Isham writes: "Everything seemed to show that the 



WHITFIELD HOUSE AND HISTORICAL MUSEUM 15 

wall had been rebuilt;" he remembers "no old work." And 
it is the general, though not the universal, opinion of those who 
remember the changes of 1868 that the south wall is substan- 
tially new. In the foundation some new work was found in the 
form of a lining, but the old work remained behind it and there 
seems no reasonable doubt that the original foundation of at 
least the main building is virtually intact. 

But could the modern part of the house be made to disappear 
we should certainly see a roofless ruin, with the great north 
chimney, like a low crumbling tower, standing amongst and 
partly supporting ragged fragments of wall, but a ruin in which 
we could trace three sides of the square room in which we have 
fancied Whitfield to have faced his first New England winter 
in the late autumn of 1639. But what should we see if chimney 
and walls stood as Whitfield left them in 1650? There are 
several pictures of the building made before the general recon- 
struction of 1868, and the Museum contains a model prepared 
in 1855. Changes had been made in the course of the eighteenth 
century but we do not know that they affected the external 
appearance of the house except by the removal of the south 
chimney, the introduction of at least one window in front and 
the enlargement of others. And there is a view based on a 
drawing made in 1862, and agreeing with the model just men- 
tioned, which is not only far more picturesque than the rest, 
but is so largely in virtue of the correspondence which appears 
between the wing on the east and the venerable north end, so 
that the former looks not less venerable. Of the north end, 
as shown in the picture in question, it is enough to say that it 
looks, as it should, lower than at present and in consequence 
a little broader, which it was not. In the angle between the 
main building and the ell is the small stone structure already 
referred to as perhaps a stairwell, and which strengthens the 
picturesque efifect of angles and broken lines characteristic of 
this view. The effect is completed by another projecting chim- 
ney at the east end or rear of the ell of the same general pattern 
as the principal one and strongly suggesting an essentially con- 
temporaneous origin. It is naturally smaller than the other, 
and has only one sloping oft'set instead of three, but makes up 
for this sobriety of outline by thrusting itself into and finally 



1 6 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

emerging from an aggressively overhanging wooden gable which 
contained two secret closets, one on each side of the chimney, and 
behind the wall. All this is lost in the modern wing, which 
has no irregularities of form, is longer than its predecessor by 
the width of one room, and is of the height of the main building.* 
As to the arrangement of the interior in Whitfield's time, we 
have even less material for positive assertion, and can assert 
positively only this, that after 1868, at all events, there remained 
no recognizable traces of the original arrangement. Hence, in 
such changes as might be made, there was no danger of destroy- 
ing anything ancient existing within the walls. There is still 
preserved an oak stair-rail made of the old timber, but this 
throws no light on the primitive interior. I have, however, 
already referred to a tradition that the front part of the house 
consisted of a single room as high as the side walls, if not as 
high as the roof. This apartment was used, it is said, for 
public worship and, we may suppose, for other public assem- 
blies, until the first meeting-house was built, presumably three 
or four years after the settlement. It was made more suitable 
for family use by folding partitions which could be let down 
or drawn up as occasion required. This tradition is traceable 
to a former owner of the house, Mrs. Nathaniel Griffing, who 
died in 1865, when she lacked but two days of completing her 
ninety-eighth year, and who was, of course, born in 1767. Her 
husband had inherited the Whitfield property in 1800, and her 
interest in it must have been strong much earlier, while the 
tradition must have come down from some period still nearer 
the days of Whitfield. The circumstantial character of this 
account renders it more credible. If it be asked how the house, 
even with movable partitions and even when enlarged by the 
erection of the ell, containing very likely an upper room, could 
have been a comfortable abode for Mr. Whitfield's large family, 
it can be replied that few persons would have asked the question 
then. A generation or two earlier, and to some extent in Whit- 
field's own generation, a country squire in England might have 
had as few rooms and as small a house as the first minister of 
Guilford. At the close of the seventeenth century the house of 

* The view described will be found after Dr. Walker's paper on "The 
Colonial Minister." 



WHITFIELD HOUSE AND HISTORICAL MUSEUM I 7 

an important county family had but one upper room, where 
the squire slept in a curtained bed while his daughters and the 
maids slept without curtains around him, and the sons and serv- 
ing--«iTien in the hall below, in which, moreover, the entire house- 
hold sat when indoors during the day. In this case, as in multi- 
tudes of others, the original high hall had evidently been divided 
by a floor, but this was almost always done after, perhaps long 
after the house was built, and was done, of course, at an addi- 
tional outlay, by way of improvement, just as a modern house 
is often made more spacious and commodious as the owner's 
wealth increases. Hence, Mr. Whitfield's high hall, if he had 
one, might have been the result of a wish to avoid extravagance 
rather than of a wish to give greater dignity to his dwelling. 
His own wealth need not have prevented this, for if, as is 
virtually certain, he was very influential in framing the early 
"orders" of the town, then we may doubtless see his hand in 
the precaution (not taken in New Haven) against the acquisi- 
tion by the richer men of large bodies of land. No one might, 
without the permission of the majority of the freemen, "put 
in his estate above five hundred pounds to require accomoda- 
tions proportionable in any divisions of land," while "the poorest 
planter," perhaps worth ten pounds or less, could have land 
"proportionable" to an estate of fifty pounds. The brotherly, 
if not democratic, spirit thus shown would probably incline 
Whitfield to seek simplicity and avoid ostentation in his own 
domestic arrangements. Nevertheless the question as to the 
height of the room remains an open one. Mr. Isham, looking 
on the tradition with favor, is yet constrained to say, "As regards 
the great questions of the house, the alterations have no real 
evidence to offer." 

In such circumstances a restoration in the proper sense was 
impracticable because no one could be said to know what to 
restore. But it was both practicable and necessary to prepare 
the interior for the uses of the Historical Museum which the 
trustees were required by the legislature of Connecticut to 
establish in the Whitfield house. This involved the opening of 
an exhibition room as large, and likewise as attractive, as the 
conditions permitted. To destroy anything ancient in construct- 
ing a room intended for the reception and preservation of ancient 



l8 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

things would have been as absurd as it would have been mon- 
strous, but the modern partitions and floor might be destroyed 
without scruple. The tradition haunting the house, its oldest 
tenant, summoned us to do just this and the house refused 
to supply incredulous science with any exorcism for banishing 
or silencing its tenant. The testimony of hundreds of colonial 
houses to the colonial habit of building "low between joists" was 
weighty, but could scarcely outweigh the belief of several genera- 
tions, derived, it is most likely, from the knowledge of an earlier 
generation, that this particular house was otherwise built, added 
to the fact that the colonist who built it might have seen lofty 
halls by the score in ancient English dwellings, and the fact 
that the fireplaces and chimney which this colonist built bear a 
degree of testimony to his apparent preference for antiquated 
forms. A more practical, if not more weighty, objection to tear- 
ing away the upper floor was the inconvenience, to say no more, 
of sacrificing half the floor space available at the time. But more 
space would be available later, and the dignity and attractiveness 
which might be secured in a rather lofty apartment carried the 
day in favor of height. 

But could this long, high room, even if it should have dignity, 
have legitimately any other kind of attractiveness? The bits of 
plaster found clinging to the old stonework of the north wall 
make it probable that at first this end of the original room 
presented the aspect, picturesque, perhaps, but not beautiful, 
of rough plastering on rough stones. When the room was 
lengthened (if it was), this might have been covered by a wains- 
cot or hangings or both. But if Whitfield, as I have suggested, 
desired to set an example of simplicity and economy, then the 
chances seem to be that his large hall was characterized by the 
very rude simplicity of bare, uneven walls. In 1632, or earlier, 
Governor Winthrop himself condemned costly wainscots as a bad 
example "in the beginning of a plantation."* On the other 
hand, not only must Mr. Whitfield have been familiar with 
handsome oak panelling in England, and very possibly under 
his father's roof, but close at hand in New Haven, then famous 
for its expensive houses, there seems to have been some fine oak 
wainscoting of "the best of joiner's work," and Governor Eaton's 

* Savage's Winthrop, ed. 1853, i- 88. 



WHITFIELD HOUSE AND HISTORICAL MUSEUM I9 

great house, furnished with hangings of different colors (as 
with tapestry for the beds), in the upper rooms, may well have 
had a wainscoted hall and parlor below stairs. '*= And since it 
was not seemly to lodge the commonwealth of Connecticut in 
something a good deal like a barn, and since an oak wainscot 
would illustrate some interiors which could have been found by 
the middle of the seventeenth century in what is now Connecti- 
cut, and since Mr. Whitfield was rich enough to have had such 
adornments had he wished, the chief exhibition room of the 
Historical Museum was furnished with a simple oak panelling 
of a pattern to be seen in the room itself in various photographs 
of English interiors of Whitfield's period and even of his county 
of Surrey. A wainscot covering the whole wall would have 
been too costly, as would tapestry or leather hangings. Accord- 
ingly green burlap, as having a sort of neutral character and 
easily to be replaced by something else, was used above the 
woodwork. Even this might suggest in a modest v/ay the hang- 
ings in Governor Eaton's "greene chamber" where Whitfield 
may have slept. To place the stairs, patterned after ancient 
examples, in the space occupied by the ancient stairwell, and to 
open a fireplace in the south chimney such as must in early 
times have faced the great one at the north end, came as near 
being restoration as the case admitted of. The new fireplace, 
it is true, had to be smaller than the old one because the south 
chimney, a modern one, is smaller than the other. On the other 
hand, a feature of the larger English halls, the gallery for 
musicians, was almost reproduced unintentionally when a railing 
was placed for safety on that side of the small entry at the 
head of the stairs which faces the larger room, at a considerable 
height above the floor of the latter. This gives very much the 
effect of a gallery, though at the side instead of the end of the 
apartment, as in the old halls. It has to be acknowledged that 
the somewhat ornate room looks rather out of keeping with the 
rude fireplace which is by far its most important feature and 
which is worth immeasurably more than any amount of grace- 
ful decoration. But sooner or later this hall could reasonably 
be expected to be occupied by handsome old furniture and the 

* Stiles, History of Judges, pp. 64, 66, and A''. H. Proh. Rec; quot. in 
Isham and Brown's Early Conn. Houses, pp. 97-1 11, 287-296. 



26 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

walls to be hung with pictures, even more sadly out of keeping 
with an ungainly environment. And the old fireplace, a price- 
less possession, would justify itself even in a palace, like a king 
in rusty armor standing in the midst of bowing or kneeling 
courtiers in silk and velvet. 

In all that I have said thus far about the Henry Whitfield 
house I have really been talking about the State Historical 
Museum and its collections. For the house is the great feature 
of that and them, the choicest treasure of the institution, exclu- 
sively and securely its own. And the act of the legislature estab- 
lishing the Museum was in a manner the announcement by our 
Little Mother, the Commonwealth of Connecticut, of her intention 
to do honor to Whitfield's dwelling by making herself a home 
at his fireside. The announcement was at first heeded almost 
unconsciously by those who had to introduce her into her 
domicile. The first entry in the manuscript catalogue is that of 
the gift, coming from the State capital, and sent by a member 
of the Governor's staff, of a letter written in 1781 by a Con- 
necticut soldier who had commanded a brigade in the campaign 
against Burgoyne, and two of whose descendants, natives of 
Litchfield, have been very nearly the most famous of American 
men and women, and addressed to a state official, brother of a 
Connecticut signer of the Declaration of Independence, and 
nephew of an early head of Yale college, and one who, by 
pledging his personal credit to the State, helped to equip the 
expedition which under the Connecticut hero, Ethan Allen, took 
Ticonderoga. Next come two relics of the Charter Oak, another 
"Talking Oak," with a large part of what is most memorable in 
the commonwealth to tell us of. And it soon became an object 
of conscious and special effort to make the collections, which 
can never be very large, illustrative as far as possible of the 
history of the State and the life of its people. It was felt that 
this small institution could best justify its existence and prove 
its right to be called a State institution by thus limiting its 
scope. It can never enter into competition with a society like 
this, for example, even in the field in which they glean together, 
but it can aspire to have at least a distinctive character in virtue 
of what it forbears to glean in other fields. And undoubtedly 
there remain, in spite of the zeal of associated and individual 



WHITFIELD HOUSE AND HISTORICAL MUSEUM 2 1 

collectors, busy at their task for generations, enough objects of 
historical interest in garrets and cellars and barns, and in beautiful 
old colonial parlors, to fill the Whitfield house several times over. 
Let me give an example of the way in which our slowly growing 
collections, still short of five hundred deposits,* illustrate the 
early life of our people, their industry, their thrift, their ingenuity, 
in virtue of all of which nobody employed another to do anything 
for him except what he could not do himself, which was very 
little. A certain series of deposits begins with a bundle of ftax 
(which had to be raised on the premises for the purpose last 
year,) lying on a flax brake, evidently homemade, and used to 
crush the hard parts of the stem. Next comes a very different 
implement, light and not ungraceful, a wooden flax-knife, which 
could easily have been made at home and which separated the 
larger fragments from the fibre. Then we have a hatchel, on 
which the skill of a craftsman was probably employed, and by 
which the fibre was farther cleansed and the flax freed from 
the tow. The result of these processes (with one or two others 
not illustrated as yet) is shown in a mass of flax prepared for 
spinning more than seventy years ago. The flax-wheel follows, 
the wheel itself made by the wheelwright, who in those days 
was commonly near at hand, but the frame probably constructed 
on the farm, while the four curved branches of the distaff were 
joined at one end in the woods by nature, at the other end by 
anybody who could tie a string. With the wheel goes the cup 
in which the spinner's fingers must be moistened, and of which 
two forms are on exhibition, both chiefly of nature's making. 
One is a small gourd from the garden, which the boy who 
picked it could finish with his knife ; the other, rather less primi- 
tive, became brought within reach by the progress of New Eng- 
land commerce, the shell of a cocoanut, but also prepared for 
duty at the wheel in a domestic factory. Next to the spinning- 
wheel and its appurtenances there is a reel for winding the 
linen thread into skeins; then swifts for winding the skeins into 
balls; a quill-wheel for transferring the balls by another wind- 
ing to the quills, or bobbins, which were to be slipped into the 

* The number of deposits in the Museum April 22, 1911, was 751. A 
few loans had been recalled and a very few articles were missing. The 
number of visitors registered April i was just 15,000. 



2^2 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

shuttle for weaving ; specimens of quills and a couple of shuttles 
as representatives of the loom, itself too large to be exhibited;* 
and finally a linen napkin which the weaver had left half woven 
when he dropped his shuttle one day and picked up his musket 
and marched away, perhaps to Bunker Hill, to finish his work 
when he came home. 

In the Museum are to be seen a few, as yet too few, memorials 
of colonial gentility, as also of colonial scholarship. There is 
the great wainscot chair of Governor Leete, a less imposing chair 
of Governor Saltonstall, a roundabout chair of John Hart, first 
minister of East Guilford and long regarded as the first graduate 
of Yale college, a patch-box which comes originally from a 
branch of the Wolcotts, with a tiny mirror under its lid to 
show the lady whether the patches were in their places on her 
cheek or her chin, and the triangular wooden hat-box in which 
Captain Nathaniel Johnson (who by the way, married a descend- 
ant of Governor Eaton) kept his cocked hat. His more 
distinguished brother, Samuel Johnson of Stratford and King's 
College, appears in a manuscript lecture on logic, read to his 
pupils in New Haven, in 171 7, when he was not yet one and 
twenty, and who happened, just then, to constitute the entire 
resident faculty of the college; and also in a definition of 
geology given by him incidentally in 1730, and then as cor- 
rect as it was comprehensive, and which embraced, among other 
subjects of terrestrial inquiry, optics, navigation and music. 

In illustrating the history of the commonwealth some empha- 
sis has designedly been given to its less known passages. This 
illustration (not to speak of a few books which we hope will 
grow into many) is for the most part very simple and inexpen- 
sive, for there have been scarcely any funds for the purchase 
of such objects as we would gladly have obtained. There is 
as yet no endowment and the State appropriations serve chiefly 
for current expenses and urgent improvements. To make sure 
of going back far enough in history, there is a plate, sent us 
from England, and showing the arrowheads used by neolithic 
man before. Britain had become an island, procured for com- 
parison with those used by the race from whom our fathers 

* But since procured and placed with a variety of the homelier deposits 
in the spacious attic, now well lighted. 



WHITFIELD HOUSE AND HISTORICAL MUSEUM 23 

bought our territory. The progress which followed is curiously 
exhibited in a stone axe lying beside an English-made toma- 
hawk, testifying to the growth of peaceful (and profitable) trade. 
There are certain mementoes of the Tories, illustrative of the 
ample good that was in them, and was rather prodigally given 
away in the persons of the exiles who founded New Brunswick 
and Ontario. There are maps, mostly homemade and to be 
replaced, it may be hoped, by better ones some day, showing 
Connecticut before the charter, when it included a large part of 
Long Island and had an Atlantic coast; and Connecticut after 
the charter, when as far as the king's word availed, it stretched 
across the continent and had a Pacific coast; and a Connecticut 
town named Westmoreland, belonging to Litchfield county in 
1774, and bringing in the Susquehanna and the Delaware, which 
watered it, to be sisters of the Housatonic and the Naugatuck. 

But I must close abruptly with a word of acknowledgment, 
spoken not in forgetfulness of many other most generous con- 
tributors, but as an act of simple justice to a company of ladies 
who, as an organization and as individuals have, next to the 
State itself, done most to create and equip the Museum, the 
Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America. After 
giving nearly one-tenth of the purchase money, they paid more 
than two-thirds of the cost of the recent changes, while members 
of the society have made very valuable additions to the collec- 
tions, and two of them have rendered services, some of which 
can hardly be over-estimated, on the board of trustees. Thus 
daughters of Whitfield and Davenport and Hooker, of Leete and 
Eaton and Haynes, have with others provided a fair chamber 
for our Little Mother in which she may dwell for coming 
centuries in the grave, spiritual beauty of her most strenuous 
youth. And by that fireside, which is an altar, none of whatever 
creed will forbid her to confess the enduring Power which makes 
for righteousness in her own creed, already recited for centuries, 
Qui transtulit sustinet* 

* The motto of Connecticut ; "He who transplanted sustains." 
[The necessary revision of this paper has been made difficult by the 
writer's impaired health. He has particularly to regret that he could not 
get access to his notes, stored for two or three years in closets and else- 
where, without too much physical effort, and is therefore able to furnish 
very few references, and to make but scanty acknowledgment of valuable 
assistance.] 



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KINDLY FURNISHED (IN THE FORM OF A DRAWING WHICH COULD NOT 

BE REPRODUCED TO ADVANTAGE) BY THE ARCHITECT WHO 

DESIGNED THE EXHIBITION ROOM, MR. NORMAN M. 

ISHAM, OF PROVIDENCE, R. I. 



PAPERS READ 



FORMAL OPENING 



STATE HISTORICAL MUSEUM, 

IN THE 

HENRY WHITFIELD HOUSE, 
September 21, 1904. 



GUILFORD AMONG HER NEIGHBORS. 

By Professor Samuel Hart, D.D., D.C.L., of the Berkeley Divinity School, 
Middletown, President of the Connecticut Historical Society. 

We who have come from other parts of the State in answer 
to your kind invitation, may be pardoned for asking why it is 
that a State Historical Museum should be established in this 
town. It is not the first place founded in the limits of what 
is now Connecticut, nor is it the capital city, nor yet at the 
centre of territory or of population. We cannot expect that 
the building will open its doors to throngs of tourists, who, after 
giving hours to other objects of interest on their line of travel, 
will turn aside here for a few minutes and come out to check 
off in the guide-book one more thing seen and out of the way. 
None of these too obvious reasons will account for our gather- 
ing here to-day. Something, indeed a great deal, might be said 
for the enthusiasm and energy of one who has made the his- 
tory and fortunes of his adopted town his own, has taught even 
its own citizens to take a new interest in it, and has waited for 
opportunities to claim for it an honored place in the common- 
wealth. And again, we confess that there is no place within 
our borders where there is ready to hand a building like this — 
ancient, far beyond any other structure in the State, perhaps 
beyond any other in neighboring states, and probably the 
oldest dwelling in the territory of the thirteen colonies (for I 
think that even professional skeptics would find it very hard 
to prove the existence of an older one), built as strong as a 
fort, and doubtless meant to be ready to do duty as a fort, 
and also as spacious as a public hall, and a public hall of meeting 
we know it was as it is to-day. The structure still standing 
after all these years in a half isolated dignity, has invited the 
use to which it is now dedicated. And it is a great satis- 
faction to us who represent historical societies and patriotic 
associations, who care for records and mementos of the past, 
to know that as far as personal pledges and official action can 



28 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

determine the future, the Old Stone House is forever safe from 
harmful decay and from no less harmful innovation, and is made 
of permanent service to the commonwealth. 

But I am inclined to think that there is another reason, such 
as may be called historical or may be called mystical and per- 
haps is both, which makes Guilford a suitable place for the 
custody of some of those things which we include under the 
name of the antiquities of Connecticut. The place which this 
settlement held among its neighbors made it in some way a logi- 
cal centre for them. When the first colonists came here in 
1639, there were three distinct settlements of distinct character- 
istics within the limits of what was to be the Colony and later 
the State of Connecticut. On the west bank of the Great River, 
the Ultima Thule of that day, safely below the bounds of Massa- 
chusetts, was a new commonwealth, embodying clearly defined 
theories in church and in State, destined to be the model of a 
great republic and indeed of all modern constitutional govern- 
ment ; it had been founded by practical men, led by a practical 
preacher and a practical lawyer, and it had a very practical 
purpose. About the same time, at the mouth of the same river 
and also on its western bank, another party of men had built 
a fort and had laid out a tract of land for the occupation of 
persons of quality and others who were expected soon to arrive ; 
theirs was the military government of the day, and the men who 
were stationed there were on the watch not only for the protec- 
tion of the interests of those whom they immediately repre- 
sented, but also for the defence of their neighbors ; their leaders 
were a soldier and an engineer. A few years later, a third 
company, who had come from England by way of Boston, had 
found a home for themselves at the fair haven made by the 
mouth of the Quinnipiack, and had laid out there a four-square 
city; they combined a spirit of theocracy and a spirit of com- 
mercial enterprise ; they were led by a theologian and a wealthy 
merchant. Close after them came the settlers of this town, 
sailing directly from England, bringing with them Mr. Daven- 
port's child, whom they left with the parents at New Haven, 
and Mr. Fenwick (coming for the second time) and his wife 
the Lady Boteler, whom they had escorted half of the way to 
the Saybrook fort when they reached this fair plain and laid out 



GUILFORD AMONG HER NEIGHBORS 29 

the common about which they were to dwell. They were dis- 
tinctively a company of yeomen, as the phrase then went, and 
this was the typical settlement of farmers; and they were a 
body of young men — their leader, to be sure, was forty-six 
years old, but no other of the "pillars" had passed his thirtieth 
year. Midway between an aristocratic government and a mili- 
tary post, they made a civil compact in which special precau- 
tions were taken that there should be no great inequality based 
on wealth, and they kept here for themselves and for posterity 
the large-bodied, wide-horned, red cattle which the wife of the 
governor of Saybrook had brought to these shores. Their 
organization was largely based on that of the New Haven 
colony, with which indeed the community soon became united, 
while their building was somewhat in the style of that at the 
mouth of the river to the east. For this, though undoubtedly 
the largest and the strongest, was not the only stone structure 
here; there were other stone houses and there was a stone 
meeting-house, a marvel for those times. 

Mr. Davenport, it was said by one of his contemporaries, was 
"more fit for Zebulon's ports than for Issachar's tents ;" the 
Guilford farmers did not seek a port, though they took up their 
lands not far from the sound ; they were rather like the patri- 
arch's description of Issachar, a strong beast of burden crouch- 
ing down in a land which he saw to be pleasant, bowing his 
shoulder to bear burdens and made to labor hard at his task. 
And in them we may see, as I think, the combination of certain 
of the most distinctive features of their neighbors to the right 
hand and to the left. 

And I believe that we can also see something which makes 
a connection between this settlement and the colony directly 
north of it in Hartford and the sister towns. There was an 
independence here and a practical way of making plans and 
putting them into operation which reminds us of Hooker and 
Ludlow. If the compact which was formed seemed even more 
locally ecclesiastical than did that made in New Haven, I am 
inclined to think that it was in order that it might escape the 
danger of interference from the stronger people to the west. 
There must have been here from the first some ground of 
sympathy with the democracy of the Connecticut colony. Those 



30 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

who had not the franchise were not debarred from the meetings 
of the burgesses, but had even the right of speaking in them; 
and equal social standing and equal power of public debate 
do not consist with exclusive political rights and theories. 
There were those in the New Haven confederation who sub- 
mitted quite willingly when they learned that Connecticut had 
a charter and that the bounds of its jurisdiction extended over 
the settlements of the New Haven colony; among them were 
some, like Governor Leete, who felt strongly the need of union 
and were willing to make sacrifices for it, and others who, like 
Bray Rossiter, claimed that they were debarred from the rights 
of English subjects and called into question the civil authority 
of the jurisdiction. Thus Guilford bore her share, and more 
than her share, in preparation for the union and in accepting 
it when it was proclaimed; and as it made a link between the 
tvv^o colonies on the shore, so it was ready, after Saybrook had 
been united with Connecticut, to assist in bringing Connecticut 
and New Haven under one government. 

We may go farther yet, and trace a connection, and almost 
claim a neighborhood, between our ancestors here and the 
Massachusetts colony. For did not John Higginson, who had 
taught the grammar school in Hartford, and had been chaplain 
of the Saybrook fort, and had come here to be colleague of Mr. 
Whitfield — did not John Higginson, when he had started to 
return to England, stop at his father's old home in Salem, accept 
ordination to the charge of the church there, and minister to 
the people of that typical Massachusetts town for eight and forty 
years? And if we would pursue neighborhood beyond the seas, 
we may well remember that the first minister here, Mr. Henry 
Whitfield, whose name this house will ever bear and whose 
memorial it will ever be, ministered to the end of his days by 
virtue of the authority which he had received when he accepted 
ordination at the hands of a bishop of England, his being the 
only example, as far as I know, of a minister in one of our 
early New England churches who had no special ordination on 
this side of the ocean. 

So we think to-day of the way in which the little colony here, 
separate though it seemed to be from them all, had something 
which made a relationship between it and each of the three 



GUILFORD AMONG HER NEIGHBORS 3 1 

original colonies, to north, to west, and to east, had until well 
into the eighteenth century a living connection with Massa- 
chusetts, and did not wantonly break with the mother land of 
England. 

The stone house standing here — if neighbors came from New 
Haven they might have called it a mansion ; or from Saybrook, 
a fort; or from Hartford, a town hall. Mansion and fort and 
town hall it was; but we have chief pleasure in thinking of it 
as a home, the home of the chief man of the place, the pastor 
and the leader of the community. And it is well that, restored 
as near as may be to the pristine arrangement of its ample 
spaces, with walls which it will need many times the centuries 
that have already passed over them to bring to dust, not 
crowded by structures of these latter days, but standing as of 
old in the open fields, the State of Connecticut should maintain 
it as a place of historic witness, to which men may come to learn 
what sort of folk they were and what sort of deeds they did, 
who laid in these colonies such abiding foundations. 

"Tantae molis erat pro nobis condere gentem." 



THE COLONIAL MINISTER. 

By Professor Williston Walker, D.D., of the Yale Divinity School, New 
Haven, President of the New Haven Colony Historical Society. 

Had we been gathered this afternoon in a southern common- 
wealth of these United States to celebrate colonial beginnings, 
we might have assembled under the shelter of some stately 
planter's home on the banks of the James, and have looked upon 
its ample proportions, its dignified exterior, and the group of 
cabins adjoining, in which its humbler retainers had found their 
abode, as typical of the life of that bygone age. We meet 
to-day to commemorate the opening as a historical museum, not 
of a planter's but of a minister's home ; and that it is a minis- 
ter's home which is thus set apart as a permanent memorial is, 
in fact, as characteristic of the colonial beginnings of New 
England, as a planter's mansion would be typical of the pros- 
perous days of southern colonial life. For the survival of the 
minister's house, under the friendly shelter of which we are 
to-day gathered, may stand as illustrative of the significance of 
the minister himself in early New England, where his promi- 
nence in all matters of social concern and civic interest was 
equal to that of any, while his actual leadership was, in most 
of the settlements of New England, the chief factor in the life 
of the community. It is right and proper that we should set 
apart to-day a minister's home for the perpetual preservation 
of the memories associated with the settlement of this portion 
of the ancient colony of Connecticut. 

It is certainly fitting, therefore, to ask the question, what 
sort of a man the colonial minister was whose significance 
in New England's beginnings was so considerable. 

One trait which he shared in common with many of those 
of whom he was the leader, was that of sacrifice. It is hard 
for us, as we look out over this smiling landscape on this bril- 
liant September afternoon, to conceive of the privations which 
were necessitated by leaving the comfortable homes and the 



THE COLONIAL MINISTER S5 

settled ways of England for what was then this raw, unsub- 
dued wilderness. The changes involved in the surroundings 
and the comforts of a Cotton abandoning his stately church 
edifice in the English Boston for the new, rough meeting-house 
amid the group of rude dwellings wdiich bore that name across 
the Atlantic, or of a Davenport exchanging his London pulpit 
for the sanctuary of the oak at Quinnipiac, where all institu- 
tions had to be created afresh, or of a Whitfield leaving the 
pleasant farming country of Surrey for the then unsubdued 
wilderness in Guilford, implied sacrifices such as, in these days 
of easy communication, few emigrants are called upon to endure. 
It has often been said that the best gift that can come to any 
country is that of men; and the most desirable of all men who 
can come as such gifts are those who are moved to seek new 
homes by the impulse of conscientious principles rather than 
simply by the desire to better their financial condition. Such 
men were preeminently the colonial ministers; men who left 
comfortable homes, congenial companionships, scholarly envi- 
ronments, that they might advance a cause which was dear to 
them, and which they believed to be that of righteousness and 
truth. 

Another characteristic of the colonial minister in general was 
that he was a man of force. He was a strong man, leading 
strong men. Not but that there were great differences in 
influence and power between the colonial ministers of New 
England ; but certainly, to cite a single instance, there is no more 
remarkable example of the moulding authority of a ministerial 
leader anywhere to be found than that of John Davenport 
at New Haven, when he induced the settlers of that planta- 
tion, before a church had been formed or before they them- 
selves knew who would be members of it, to resign the right 
of suffrage by a self-denying ordinance to those who should 
be of the future church membership, thus very possibly depriv- 
ing themselves, under his forceful persuasion, of what is usually 
'one of the most cherished of political rights. The wisdom of 
this action taken under the New Haven pastor's initiative, I do 
not now discuss ; but it certainly ranks high as an illustration of 
persuasive leadership. Of John Cotton, Davenport's great con- 
temporary at Boston, it was said, certainly with exaggeration, 



34 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

but nevertheless with no inconsiderable degree of warrant, that 
"whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an Order 
of Court if of a civil, or set up as a practice in the church if of 
an ecclesiastical, concernment." What was true of these two 
eminent men might be said in some measure of the whole body 
of the colonial ministry. 

A third characteristic of the ministers of early New England 
was their love of education. They were themselves prevail- 
ingly men of superior intellectual training, and they believed 
that only as knowledge should be made accessible to the many, 
as well as special training be given to the leaders of the com- 
munity, could the best interests of State and Church be pre- 
served. John Eliot, that quaintest and in many respects most 
lovable of the ministers of early New England, well voiced 
the general sentiment which animated them all and which led 
to the planting of schools and of a college in the very begin- 
nings of colonial life, when he uttered this prayer while leading 
the devotions of the "Reforming Synod" of 1679, in words 
as sincere as they were unliturgical, "Lord, for schools every 
where among us ! That our schools may flourish ! That every 
member of this assembly may go home, and procure a good 
school to be encouraged in the town where he lives. That 
before we die, we may be so happy as to see a good school 
encouraged in every plantation of the country." Certainly the 
interest in education, which has always characterized New Eng- 
land and which New England has made part of our national 
heritage, is a debt which we owe in no small degree to the 
impress upon his own age of the colonial minister. 

They were men, too, in not a few instances, of statesmanlike 
insight. It has sometimes been alleged that New England in its 
early days was a priest-ridden land. No conception could be 
further from the truth. There was indeed a veneration for the 
ministerial office which does not now obtain. It was a source 
of intellectual light and spiritual leading to the community of 
that day to an exclusive degree difficult for us easily to realize 
in an age in which so many other leaderships of law, of medi- 
cine, of science, of journalism, and of education, now share 
with it its former intellectual preeminence. The strength of 
the early colonial ministry and its power over those who were 




SUPI'OSED APPEARANCE OF EXTERIOR IN HENRY WHITFIEI.d's TIME : APPROXIMATE. 



THE COLONIAL MINISTER 35 

moulded by its influence were not in any sacerdotal reverence 
which it aroused, but in its direct and forceful leadership; and 
in its most gifted representatives this leadership rose to states- 
manlike height. Whatever may have been the share of Roger 
Ludlow, with his knowledge of the law, in the framing of the 
fundamental orders of Connecticut, — and I would not abate a 
whit the large credit that may be due to him for its content or 
for the form in which that noble constitution of 1639 was 
clothed, no one can doubt that a chief part of its inspiration 
came from the brain of a ministerial founder of Hartford, 
Thomas Hooker. To him was due the assertion, in the months 
immediately preceding the framing of the constitution, of such 
cardinal principles of political wisdom as that the "foundation 
of authority is laid firstly in the free consent of the people" and 
"that the choice of the public magistrates belongs unto the 
people by God's own allowance." These are basal truths that 
have been wrought into the very fabric of our American civil 
life. 

It is eminently fitting, therefore, that when we meet to-day 
to open this State IMuseum, in a house built for the colonial 
minister who was foremost in the planting of this Guilford com- 
munity, we should call to mind some of the traits of these spirit- 
ual leaders of early New England. They were a race of strong 
men who left their impress upon those whom they led, who 
witnessed to truth as they understood it with self-denying forti- 
tude, and who have made the story not merely of New England, 
but of our country as a whole, far other than it would have 
been had they not done their work. Well may we honor them 
to-day for what they were and what they did in the time when 
New England's foundations were laid. 



THE CHARACTER OF HENRY WHITFIELD. 

By Mrs. Frank W. Cheney of South Manchester, a trustee. 

Coming to-day to open to the uses of the Commonwealth of 
Connecticut this ancient house, which the State Trustees, the 
Colonial Dames of Connecticut, and the people of Guilford have 
done their best to restore and adorn, there is no question that 
springs up in our minds more spontaneously than this : 

Who and what manner of man was he for whom it was built ; 
by whose ideas its form was shaped ; who slept and sometimes 
ate in it (when there was anything to eat) ; who studied and 
wrote, — aye, and preached in it, and whose children romped 
in its garret and were punished in its corners? 

Most of us are somewhat familiar with the facts of his life 
and have drawn inferences more or less truly in accordance 
with them. To many the fact of his return to England has 
been a blighting one. But until we understand the man we 
cannot understand the deed. Bear with me, therefore, while 
I rehearse his history, trying to gather as we go such light as 
it sheds upon his character. 

Henry Whitfield was born in 1591,* in the County of Surrey, 
a region of softly rolling hills and deep embowered lanes such 

* This is the date given in Steiner's History of Guilford, and the 
author thinks that the date of 1591 given in Foster's Alumni Oxoniensis 
is "clearly wrong." But Whitfield entered Oxford in 1610, and if born 
in 1597 would have been but thirteen years old at that time, which 
makes it probable that Foster's record is correct. Born in 1591 he 
would have entered Oxford aged 19, graduated at 23, studied law two 
years, and entered the Church in 161 8, aged 27. The canons of the 
Church require that a man be 23 before he be made Deacon, and a 
year older before he may become Priest. Another fact which makes it 
probable that he was born before 1597 is that his father, Thomas Whit- 
field, was licensed to marry Mildred Manning, his mother, on the lOth 
of January, 1585. Henry Whitfield, their second son, was in all prob- 
ability born in less than twelve years after their marriage, and six years 
would be more likely. Again, it is very common to confuse the numbers 
I and 7, which in those days were written much alike, and so 1591 might 
have been read 1597. Again, if but thirteen in 1610, he would have been 



THE CHARACTER OF HENRY WHITFIELD 37 

as only southern England knows. His father was Thomas 
Whitfield, an eminent London lawyer, whose home was at Mort- 
lake on the Thames, and whose wealth and influence enabled 
him to carry out his ambitions for his sons. He intended that 
his second son, Henry, should receive the education for which 
he seemed to show capacity, and should take his own place at 
the bar. His mother was Mildred Manning, a lady of a good 
Kentish family, in whose family lines is found the name of 
England's greatest poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, although descent 
from him is not claimed. Thus on both sides Henry Whitfield 
came from families not noble, but gentle, and containing some 
illustrious names. 

Cotton Mather, in a paper entitled "Elisha's Bones, The Life 
of Mr. Henry Whitfield," alluding to the old saying that "A 
young saint makes an old devil," says: "No, a young sinner 
may make an old devil, but a young saint will certainly make 
an old angel; and so did our blessed Whitfield. He was a 
gentleman of good extraction by his birth, but of a better by his 
new birth, nor did his new birth come very long after his birth. 
In the very school itself he would be sometimes praying, and as 
he grew up he grew exceedingly in his acquaintance with God." 
It is therefore no surprise to find that after graduating at New 
College, Oxford, and beginning upon a legal training at the 
Inns of Court, the early religious tendencies claimed him for 
their own, and, as Mather says, "The gracious influences of the 
Holy Spirit upon his heart induced him to become a preacher 
of the gospel." 

But this is to anticipate. A friendship made in Oxford 
between Whitfield and George Fenwick was continued through 
life and was fraught with important consequences to both. 
They both entered the University in 1610 and were most inti- 
mate throughout their stay there. They both died in England 
in 1657. The helpful disposition of Fenwick and his wife, 
the Lady Alice Boteler, had much to do with Whitfield's com- 
ing to America, and settling in Menuncatuck, which lay in part 
upon land originally purchased of the Indians by Fenwick and 
by him given to the settlers of Guilford, as he himself wrote 

about eighteen when he became "the contracted husband" of Margaret 
Hardware, who died in 1616. 

See note at the close of this paper by Rev. W. G. Andrews. 



38 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

to William Leete, for the "love he bore to Mr. Whitfield and 
his children." So do early friendships shape a man's destiny. 

At this point we are tempted to diverge into a bit of romance, 
which, although not positively identified with the life of our 
Henry Whitfield, shows so remarkable a coincidence in date that 
we are justified in assuming that he is the man referred to. 

In February, 16 16, at which time it is supposed that Whitfield 
was studying law in London, there died in Peek, County of 
Chester, England, a maiden named Margaret Hardware, daughter 
of Henry Hardware. In her will, probated March 17, 1616, there 
are bequests to several friends, but chief among them is the 
following : 

"Item, I give to Henrye Whitfield, my contracted husband, 
the sum of one hundred and forty pounds. Item, I give to 
the said Henrie Whitfeild one white 'beare' bowl, one Tune* 
and cover and three spoons, one piece of gold of three pounds 
seventeen shillings. Item, I give unto the said Henrye Whit- 
field, more, one pair of Valence and two cushions of needle- 
work ; four towels, two short and two long ; three pair of 
sheets of flaxen of the best ; four pillow-beares ; one dozen of 
fringed napkins, four of the best table-cloths; two cupboard 
cloths ; one feather bed, two bolsters, two down pillows, one 
arras coverlet, four blankets, and all the apparell that was pro- 
vided for my marriage. . . . Memorandum, that if, after 
all my debts and legacies are paid, the remainder of my estate 
be above fifty pounds, that then Mr. Nicholas Byfield have only 
that fifty pounds, and my loving friend and contracted hus- 
band, Mr. Henry Whitfeild, have the rest of my whole estate."! 

As we have seen already, Mr. Whitfield studied law for 
a year or two after leaving college. Perhaps if Margaret Hard- 
ware had not died he might have become a successful lawyer 

* The word tune is not found in any glossaries obtainable. The 
Century Dictionary gives as one meaning of the word fun, "a vessel 
or jar," and quotes from Chaucer's Clerk's Tale the line, "Wei ofter of 
the welle than of the tonne she drank." An English glossary of 
provincialisms gives as one definition of tun, "a small cup." It is probable 
that "a tune with cover" was a covered jar or vessel of some kind 
to hold ale or liquor. 

t Weldon, 24. The spelling of the name Whitfield alternates between 
field and feild. 



THE CHARACTER OF HENRY WHITFIELD 39 

and thus have avoided those great conflicts within the Church 
into which he was led by his reHgious views. Who knows how 
much this early loss may have paved the way for "the gracious 
influences of the Holy Spirit" which took him into the ministry? 
The affections and the religious sentiments lie very near together 
in a tender and poetic nature, and the closing of one vent for 
feeling may open another. At all events, the impulse was 
strong enough to overcome the opposition of his family. In 
1618 he was ordained a minister of the Church of England, 
ordained once for all, as he seems to have felt, so that no other 
setting apart for God's work in the world was ever necessary. 
In the same year he was made incumbent of the rich living of 
Ockley, in Surrey, and was married. At this time he was, 
according to Steiner, only twenty-one years of age, but accord- 
ing to Foster twenty-seven, and in view of his varied experi- 
ences the latter estimate seems much more probable. 

The accepted spelling of the name Ockley, O-c-k-1-e-y, deprives 
it of its ancient meaning, which was Oak-lea, the land of oaks. 
"Here," says an ancient chronicler, "is a certain custom observed, 
time out of mind, of planting rose-trees upon the graves, so 
that this church yard is now full of them." Whether these 
roses became thornless, like those of St. Francis, we know 
not, but it is pleasant to associate our English saint with oaks 
and roses. His life at Ockley was presumably for many years 
one of the greatest peace and comfort. His wife was Dorothy 
Sheaffe, daughter of Thomas Sheaffe, a clergyman of Kent, 
and cousin to Joanna Sheaffe, whose mother was a Jordan and 
who married William Chittenden. Other cousins there were, 
Giles and Phineas Fletcher, sons of an ambassador to Russia 
from Queen Elizabeth, and themselves poets, writing under James 
I. and Charles I. So here we find again poetry and culture and 
high position. 

Henry Whitfield and Dorothy, his wife, had a family of nine 
children, probably all born at Ockley.* One died in infancy, 

* The baptismal record of the children of Henry Whitfield, as given 
in the N. E. Hist. & Gen. Reg. and drawn from church records at 
Ockley, is as follows : 

(i) Dorothy, bapt. at Ockley, England, March 25, 1619. She is said 
to have been the wife of Samuel Desborough and to have 
returned to England with him. They had one daughter, Sarah, 



40 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

another seems not to have come to America. Four daughters 
and two sons are all of whom we have information in maturity. 
He had abundant means, an honored position, and learning and 
culture, the crowning adornments of a rural life. His appear- 
ance is described as dignified and prepossessing, while eloquence 
and "a marvelous majesty and sanctity" are ascribed to his 
preaching. His manners had a lofty courtesy, and in all charity 
and gentleness he lived among other men as one loved and 
revered. His doctrines were accounted satisfactory, even at 

born in Guilford, March, 1649. He had two other children by later 
marriages, and as the last wife, Rose Hobson, is said to have 
been married to him in 1655, it is evident that Dorothy Disbrowe 
must have died soon after they returned to England, if not 
before. 

(2) Sarah, bapt. at Ockley, Nov. i, 1620; d. 1675, in Salem, Mass. 

She married in 1641 the Rev. John Higginson, who was her 
father's assistant as teacher and minister. In 1659 they set 
sail for England, but encountering bad weather put in to Salem, 
where Mr. Higginson had lived in his youth, and he remained 
there more than forty years. 

(3) Abigail, bapt. at Ockley, Sept. i, 1622; d. Sept. 9, 1659. She married 

Rev. James Fitch of Saybrook; they had nine children, and 
they went with a Saybrook colony to Norwich, which they helped 
to settle. 

(4) Thomas, bapt. at Ockley Dec. 28, 1624. Probably did not come to 

Guilford; may have died young. 

(5) John, bapt. at Ockley Feb. 11, 1626. He came to Guilford with 

his father and went early to New Haven, after which he seems 
to have disappeared from history. 

(6) Nathaniel, bapt. at Ockley, June 28, 1629. He, as well as John, was 

excused from the night watch in Guilford. He returned to 
England probably about 1654, and became a merchant. He is 
more widely known in connection with his family than any other 
member of it, and was with his father as witness of his will 
just before his death in 1657. He was also executor of his 
mother's will. Samuel Sewall addressed a letter to him at the 
"Navy Office" in London, 1691. 

(7) Mary, bapt. at Ockley, March 4, 163 1 ; a witness to her father's will. 

(8) Henry, bapt. at Ockley, March 9, 1633 ; died there February 28, 1634. 

(9) Rebecca, bapt. at Ockley, December 25, 1635. 

In the Mass. Hist. Coll., 6th Series, between dates 1690 and 1699, 
there are letters from Samuel Sewall and Wait Winthrop, in which 
Mr. Whitfield, Mr. Nathaniel Whitfield and Mr. Samuel Whitfield are 
mentioned. 



THE CHARACTER OF HENRY WHITFIELD 41 

that critical period. People flocked in from the surrounding 
country to hear him preach, and says Mather: "Observing that 
he did more good by preaching sometimes abroad than by 
preaching always at home, and enjoying then a living of the 
first magnitude beside a fair estate of his own, he procured and 
maintained another godly minister at Okeley, and had the 
liberty to preach in many other places which were destitute of 
ministers." In this manner his acquaintance in the neighboring 
parishes and counties became greatly extended, and especially 
among the plain farming folk, a fact which in turn had its 
influence upon his selection of colonists when the time came 
later. 

This sort of life, honored, easy and opulent, continued for 
twenty years, would make any man conservative, and Whitfield 
was doubtless so by birth and temperament. Yet we must not 
imagine that life at Ockley was all roses. The times were diffi- 
cult and under Archbishop Laud's control especially and increas- 
ingly so for conscientious clergymen of the Established Church, 
as well as for those whose extreme convictions had long 
since made them Separatists. Whitfield had been for twenty 
years a conformist, but yet, says Mather, "a pious non-con- 
formist was all this while very dear unto him." He was one 
who abounded in liberality and hospitality and "his house was 
much resorted unto" by those pious men whose non-conformity 
had got them into difficulties. Among these were Hooker and 
Davenport, Nye, Cotton and Goodwin, some of whom were 
soon to be prominent like himself in New England, and his near 
neighbors, as neighborhood was counted in those scattered and 
isolated colonies. It is worthy of note that while Whitfield was 
educated at Oxford, where in 1611 Laud became president of 
St. John's College, Hooker and Samuel Stone were students 
at Emmanuel in Cambridge, a college of Puritan foundation 
and teaching, a fact which may throw light upon the difference 
in their careers. Hooker and Whitfield very likely formed their 
friendship when Hooker was settled in the small parish of 
Esher in Surrey in 1620. From first to last, Whitfield's views 
were less tinged with Puritanism than were those of the strong 
and positive Hooker. At all events, it was some years after 
Hooker was obliged to flee to Holland before Whitfield was 



42 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

summoned and censured by the High Commission Court, of 
which Laud was the head, for not reading the "Book of Sports" 
and for not conforming to some of the new and "popish" 
requirements of the Hturgy. 

The name of Puritan was a title self-given, by men who 
sought for purity and reform within the Church. According to 
Hume, a Puritan was a cross between a mad fanatic and a 
snivelling hypocrite. Our New England idea of a Puritan is 
of a man sterner than our rocks and harsher than our March 
weather. 

By these side-lights we may get some idea of the typical 
Puritan, and comparing Whitfield with the type, we perceive 
that if he were a Puritan at all, he was so by circumstance 
rather than by nature, and that the stern stuff of the true Puri- 
tan was not in him.* Comparing him with individuals, with 
the astute Winthrop, or the fiery Dudley of the Massachusetts 
Colony, with the long enduring Bradford of Plymouth, or the 
impracticable Williams of Providence Plantations, or even with 
Davenport, whose ideas of a theocracy and an aristocracy were 
so intimately blended, we can hardly call him a Puritan. 

However, after serious discussion of the matters involved 
wnth some of his Puritan brethren, "seing much of scripture 
and reason on their side," Whitfield became at once a declared 
non-conformist and prudently left the ministry, or, as Mather 
picturesquely put it, "he embraced a modest secession." In 
1638 he resigned the living of Ockley, sold his private estate, 
and made his plans for emigration to that new land which 
seemed, with hand outstretched across the waste of waters, 
to beckon to freedom both civil and spiritual. What matter 
if privation threatened and all kinds of terrors dismayed? 
These were but the mysterious curtain hanging between the 
pilgrim and his golden hopes of a more perfect state. 

In 1636 Whitfield published in London a little book entitled 
"Some Helps to stirre up to Christian Duties." It was dedi- 
cated to Robert Grevil, Lord Brooke, who with Lord Say- 

* It will be understood that the word Puritan is here used not in its 
strict historical, but in its modern popular sense. For an accurate 
definition of the word, see The Life of Thomas Hooker, by Rev. Geo. 
Leon Walker, D.D. 



THE CHARACTER OF HENRY WHITFIELD • 43 

and-Sele and some other Puritan noblemen owned the royal 
patent under which the colony of Saybrook, bearing their two 
names, Say and Brooke, was settled by the agency of Fenwick, 
cooperating with the younger John Winthrop. A glimpse of 
an original and precious copy of this book of Whitfield's, 
once the property of David Dudley Field, and with the names 
of sundry previous owners painfully inscribed upon its title- 
page, may be found in the Library of the Connecticut Histori- 
cal Society in Hartford. The book is the mirror of the man. 
Its perfect and polished English is the garb of thoughts most 
tender and gracious and poetical. He speaks in figures and 
tropes. The language of the Bible is the warp and woof of 
it, and under the titles of the "Caldeans" and of "Bohemia," 
he alludes to persons and places that had doubtless their Eng- 
lish equivalents. Could Laud have been "the old Dagon" 
spoken of as so wicked and dangerous to God's people? Would 
that I could quote it to you in such manner as would give you 
a sense of it all. Yet one passage I must quote for its picture 
of the times : 

"Some of you have scene and most of you have heard of the 
grievous evils that have befallen us ; Behold and see if there 
was ever sorrow like unto our sorrow, to have the glorious 
Gospel of Christ taken from us, the Arke displaced and Dagon 
set in his roome, our ministers banished and our people betrayed 
unto anti-Christianisme, our country laid waste and desolate, 
many a family driven from home, not knowing where to lay 
their heads, many of us seldom going to bed with dry eyes, 
considering the many pressures, straights and necessities of our- 
selves and ours." 

Again, he takes the mental position of a philosopher, con- 
templating as one apart from the scene of struggle the vicissi- 
tudes of our human life. "The world," he says, "is as a great 
ant or Emit Hill, where there are multitudes of those busie 
creatures, carrying and recarrying strawes, stubble and other 
such luggage, and everyone busie in doing something and 
intent to adde and bring to the heape. So in this world there 
is a mighty and general businesse, an earnest trudging about, 
a continued solicitousnesse, plotting and working upon the face 
of the earth. The Timeserver is busie to fit his sailes to every 
wind, marks what is in grace and fashion with the times, and 



44 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

studies how he may please the most. The deepe and clung- 
headed* pohtician, who dwells many times the next door to 
Atheisme, is busie in wheeling about his owne ends, is dark in 
his ways, and usually like a boatman looks one way and rowes 
another. . . . The voluptuous man is busie to draw out the 
quintessence of all sinnes and vanities, to sucke the sweet out 
of them, to array himself like a child of Paradise, and to have 
his part in all the pleasures of Nature." And thus it appears 
that trolley-cars, presidential campaigns and Paris fashions have 
not altogether changed our human nature, and that in busy 
carrying of straw and stubble, intentness to add to the heap, 
earnest trudging about after nothing and love of the sweet 
vanities, we are but imitators of our ancestors. 

His religious expression, if not profound, nor the outcome 
of an intense nature, is yet pure and lofty and sincere, while 
his style has the inimitable directness and picture-making quality 
of the Elizabethan period. Thus, for instance, to quote again: 

"It is the managing of our spirits that lyeth upon us as the 
chiefest of our employment. Oh, what studying is there in the 
world of sundry sorts of salutations, garbs and complements ! 
What asking of each others health and welfare ! Yet never to 
ask his Soule how it fareth; not so much as to bid it good 
morrow or good even ! I meane, he passeth it by as a worthless 
and a neglected thing. What long pilgrimages doe many make 
with many a weary step! Yet they will not take a short journey 
down into their owne hearts nor know the behaviour and lan- 
guage of their owne Soules and consciences. Yet this, being 
the most noble worke and businesse of the mind, puts a luster 
and beauty upon the Soule. This is the speciall part of wisdome 
and makes a man the wisest man." 

And now behold Whitfield, bidding goodbye to the study and 
the fruits of leisure and the aristocratic associations of a life- 
time, and embarking, with his family and a number of friends 
and relatives and a party of plain and mostly poor people from 
his own neighborhood, upon a life of action and practical strug- 
gle hitherto undreamed of. From this time on he was a man 
out of his element. The quality of leadership was not born 
in him, although he had fortunately the best substitute for it 

* Clung, i. e. : shrunken, wasted. Clunch, i. e. impure clay ; also 
close-grained, squat, stumpy. 



THE CHARACTER OF HENRY WHITFIELD 45 

in the power to win love and reverence. Danger was exchanged 
for danger, the peril of English persecution for the lurking peril 
of the savage, the prison and martyrdom for the great sea and 
the wilderness. 

He who would found a colony requires first of all a prac- 
tical knowledge of men and affairs. His business energy will 
be more important than his sanctity. He may be bigoted, self- 
willed, unamiable, but 'he must be able to foresee and provide 
for the practical needs which attend the arrival of a band of 
men, women and children in an unbroken wilderness. He must 
know that the first demand will be for the blacksmith and 
the carpenter. He must remember that while a scholar and a 
gentleman may be qualified to found a State, he will need a 
jack-of-all-trades to help him do it. The men who accompanied 
Whitfield to Guilford were of two classes, farmers and edu- 
cated gentry. Among the latter were four lawyers and two 
ministers,* counting Whitfield himself as both. There were 
apparently few men who knew the trades, no masons, no black- 
smiths, perhaps one carpenter. The rest were mostly farmers. 
The yeomen of England made up an agricultural population 
equal to any the world has ever seen, and were men of such 
bone and sinew and perdurable toughness as to make the best 
possible material for colonization. It was, however, only after 
they had been trained for generations in the school of dire neces- 
sity that they developed the ingenuity, the ready wit, the faculty 
for everything, the comprehensive, all-around knowingness 
which go to make up the complete and finished Yankee. 

On shipboard, while slowly sailing to their promised land, 
this band of emigrants made with each other a solemn covenant 
and signed to it their twenty-five names. It was probably writ- 
ten by Whitfield and his signature is last on the list. The chief 
engagement made in this covenant reads thus : "And we promise 
not to desert or leave each other or the plantation, but with 
the consent of the rest, or the greater part of the Company 
who have entered into this engagment." We shall see how 
these promises were kept. 

Time fails to tell of the steps of the Colony's progress, nor 
need it be repeated here. Arrived at New Haven, it seems to 

* There is some doubt whether Hoadly acted as a minister until, after 
his return to Scotland, he became chaplain of Edinburgh Castle. 



46 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

have been Mr. Whitfield who bought the Indian lands and 
pledged his own means for the purchase. He seems to have 
imbibed there some of the governmental ideas of Davenport, 
with their theocratic features. The vote by Church members 
only, the seven pillars, the title to lands being vested in the 
Church, etc., were features not at once developed, but which 
appeared after they were more settled. When a court was 
formed Whitfield never assumed the functions of magistrate 
or judge, but he knew enough law to have done so, and doubt- 
less guided the young men who performed the actual duties. 
They desired an independent state and a constitution of their 
own, and the fascinating task of cutting a new one out of the 
whole cloth tempted them, as it tempted other men occupying 
virgin soil and dreaming of an ideal republic. But seeing them- 
selves between the Scylla of New Haven and the Charybdis 
of the Connecticut Colony, and sure to be swallowed by one or 
the other, they, under the guidance of Whitfield, chose New 
Haven and a theocracy, rather than the untried democracy of 
the larger state. In doing so they but made an instinctive rever- 
sion to an aristocratic form of government such as they had 
lived under in England. 

In standing at the head of a colony Whitfield had one inesti- 
mable advantage in that he was a minister. "The divinity 
that doth hedge a king" was, in New-Englandese, the divinity 
that doth hedge a minister. Perhaps that is what "doctor of 
divinity" means. He was considered to be the vicegerent of 
the Almighty. An indescribable awe hedged him about and 
made his every word and wish of sovereign weight and import. 
Mather says that Whitfield "carried much authority with him, 
and using frequently to visit the particular families of his 
flock, with profitable discourses on the great concerns of their 
interiour state, it is not easy to describe the reverence with which 
they entertained him." It is said that in the dreadful poverty 
of the following years "he mightily encouraged the people to 
bear with Christian patience and fortitude the difficulties of the 
wilderness they were come into, not only by his exhortations 
but also by his own exemplary contentment with low and mean 
things." He never labored with his hands, and he begged that 
his two sons, Nathaniel and John, might be excused from the 
night-watch of the town, with its discomforts and perils, show- 



THE CHARACTER OF HENRY WHITFIELD 47 

ing that he considered them privileged persons, and apparently 
valuing their safety above their hardihood. 

Building of houses went on along with state-building. The 
stone house for the minister was probably one of the first 
erected. The choice of site was good and the house perhaps 
better than anyone else in the colony could afford. Its simple 
lines express not so much the taste of the owner as the limi- 
tations of necessity. To get any skilled work done in those first 
years of extreme effort and hardship must have been well-nigh 
impossible. The house is a good one and was a remarkable 
triumph of love's labor. Rev. Dr. Wm. G. Andrews has written 
its history with painstaking detail, in another labor of love which 
needs no repeating here. 

And now came on the years whose hardships tried men's 
souls. Before 1649 seven of the leading emigrants, all young 
men but one, were dead. Then began the removals to the old 
country, to Boston, to New Haven, and to other places. By 
1660 twenty out of the original twenty-five signers were gone. 
Henry Whitfield was the first to return to England in 1650. 
To look at this fact in any tolerant light we must first consider 
what had been going on in England. Charles I was executed 
in 1649. There were two wild years when Cromwell kept Eng- 
land and Scotland under the harrow, pursuing the fugitive 
prince, creating and dissolving parliaments, sweeping the seas 
with the fleets, and making hard times for Papists and good 
times for Puritans. The English Inquisition was over, and 
men dared to call their souls their own. The bugle was sounded 
for recall, and those who trusted the great Protector were 
marching back. There came to Whitfield, who had never been 
obnoxious even to the old government, urgent invitations to 
return. He had expended all his fortune for the colony and 
his family. His health was failing. The people were called 
together to see if they could support him. They were unable 
to squeeze out more than a few shillings to add to his salary of 
105 pounds. The most they could say was that they "hoped 
they could continue their present some." Mr. Whitfield "judged 
that the people did so much as they were able and dealt respect- 
fully and kindly with him, but yet he could not any farther 
engage himself than formerly." And so the end came. "At 
the time of parting the whole town accompanied him to the water- 



48 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

side, with a spring-tide of tears because they should see his face 
no more." And perhaps some of the tears were shed because 
those who stayed knew they should see old England no more. 
On his way to Boston he was driven by contrary winds to 
Martha's (then called Martin's) Vineyard, and there became 
interested in the work of Thomas Mayhew among the Indians, 
and this led him also to visit John Eliot at Roxbury. And it 
followed that on his return to England he wrote two little appeals 
for the Indian work under these apostles, books with fanciful 
titles like his early writings. They were : "The Light appearing 
more and more towards the Perfect Day, or, a Farther Discovery 
of the Present State of the Indians in New England, concerning 
the progresse of the Gospel amongst them." And 

"Strength out of Weakness, or, a Glorious Manifestation of 
the further progresse of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New 
England." 

In this latter work are enthusiastic expressions concerning 
"the Spirit into which these poore Creatures are sweetly bap- 
tized." 

This Indian episode was perhaps but the natural consequence 
of wind and weather; but when we remember the sacred charge 
which he was leaving at Guilford; when we recall the solemn 
covenant never to forsake each other, by which he, as well as 
the humblest, had bound himself eleven years before on their 
voyage outward-bound; when we think of the example set by 
this shepherd of the flock which many of the gentry who had 
means for their return were not slow to follow, until William 
Leete and William Chittenden were the only ones of the original 
leaders who remained; when we contemplate the sad and 
deserted and the sometimes bitter feeling of those who were 
left behind, taken with the fact that there seems to be no 
correspondence extant between Whitfield and the Guilford people 
after his return, — then it seems to me we must feel the futility 
of his taking up at the eleventh hour the cause of the American 
Indian. It was a cause just then popular with certain members 
of Parliament, to whom he addressed himself. 

Mr. Whitfield soon found himself reinstated in the English 
Church, which, in a true sense, had never ceased to be his 
church, and took charge of a church in Winchester, The set- 
tled and scholastic air of that historic town must have been 



THE CHARACTER OF HENRY WHITFIELD 49 

most grateful to his taste after the crudeness of a new settle- 
ment. He spent about six years there and died in 1657. His 
will was witnessed in Winchester by his son Nathaniel and his 
daughter Mary, who seem to have been the only members of his 
family near him. It conveyed all his estate to his wife, to be 
by her divided among their children. She, poor woman, was 
left behind, with perhaps some of the younger children, when 
he returned to England, and probably never saw his face again. 
She remained in Guilford certainly until 1659, at which time 
he had been two years dead, and is said by a happy euphemism to 
have been "managing the estate." With the assistance of Gov. 
Leete and her son-in-law, the Rev. John Higginson, she attempted 
to sell the house and lands for a grammar-school. Failing in 
this, it was finally sold in London by her son Nathaniel to a 
Major Robert Thompson, in whose family the property long 
remained, occupied by tenants, a detriment to the interests of 
Guilford. In that year, 1659, ^^^^ son-in-law. Rev. Mr. Higgin- 
son, and Sarah Whitfield, his wife, departed, intending to go to 
England, but being driven by stress of weather into his home 
port of Salem, he remained there forty-eight years until he died. 
In all probability Mrs. Whitfield accompanied them when they 
left Guilford, as her house was sold. How long she may have 
lingered on this side of the Atlantic we do not know, but she 
died in Wapping, in the County of Middlesex, England, in 1669, 
as shown by a power of attorney from her son Nathaniel as 
executor of her will. The Rev. Thomas Ruggles, a later pastor 
of Guilford, gives a mournful picture of the condition of the 
people for about twenty years after Mr. Higginson departed. 
"In this headless state of the church," says he, "they fell into 
great confusion and diversity of opinions. Many moved to Kil- 
lingworth, others elsewhere. Some returned later." From such 
a blow it is doubtful if the town ever recovered. 

Looking back over the life of this interesting man, we seem 
to see one who is caught between two cross-seas. Early life, by 
training and circumstance, fostered the refined scholar, the gentle- 
man, perhaps the recluse. Later life demanded the stern qualities, 
the energy and hardy self-denials of the pioneer. Nature made 
him devout, spiritual, poetical, full of delicate fancies. Guilford 
called on him to grapple with material problems. Education and 



50 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

temperament made him a conservative. The times called for 
radical principles and measures. He loved England and her 
Church, and belonged to both as a picture belongs in its frame. 
Some coarser men were more effective in our New England 
history, and there were many, too, of delicate fibre who were 
faithful unto the end, — who having put the hand to the plow 
never turned back. But standing thus at the point where the 
judge is ready to give sentence, let him first count the cost of 
what Whitfield had already done for the cause, the sacrifice of 
home and all that had sweetened life, the generous lavishing of 
his private fortune for the common good, the kindly hospitalities 
wherewith he sheltered the suspected ones, the consolations he 
had given to those discouraged, and the piety and learning 
which brought him reverential love from his followers. And 
having thus taken in some degree the measure of the man, the 
judge will say: "Henry Whitfield was so good a man that he 
lacked but an ounce or two more of virile courage to be a better." 

NOTE. 

The pamphlet in which the foregoing paper first appeared was sent in 
igog to Rev. Hereford B. George, senior fellow of New College, Oxford, 
Whitfield's College, of which he, too, was for a short time a fellow. 
Mr. George of his own accord very kindly made search for additional 
information and sent us in January, 1910, the result of his search. It 
is a real sorrow to be obliged to add that Mr. George died in December, 
1910. He was a student of history and published several works in his 
own field. The last, "Historical Evidence" (1909), was favorably 
reviewed in the New York Nation, in which attention was called to 
the fact, illustrated in the book and entitled to be noticed whatever 
one's personal opinions may be, that believers in Christianity can accept 
the established results of modern study and thought without having 
their faith weakened. 

The new information about Whitfield was drawn from the registers 
of New College and of Winchester College, one of the ancient endowed 
public schools of England. Both these institutions were founded late 
in the fourteenth century by a Bishop of Winchester, William of 
Wykeham, and are closely connected. According to these registers 
Henry Whitfield was born at Greenwich, in the county of Kent, and 
not at Mortlake, Surrey, where his father lived, perhaps because his 
mother, Mildred Manning, was of Greenwich. His birth took place in 
the summer or early autumn of 1592, as appears, in part, from the fact 
that he was elected a scholar of Winchester College at the age of ten, 
between July 7 and October i, 1602. The elected scholars were supported 



THE CHARACTER OF HENRY WHITFIELD 5 1 

by the foundation, or endowment, while there were others, called "com- 
moners," for whom payment was made. Young Whitfield was admitted 
to New College June 8, 1610, at the age of seventeen, and must have 
completed his eighteenth year after the date just mentioned. The rules 
of Winchester and of New College, Oxford, strictly forbade a boy's 
remaining at the former or entering the latter when "over eighteen," and 
the rules and the registers unite in fixing the time of his birth (the exact 
date of which is not recorded in either place) in 1592, and between June 8 
and October i. 

Whitfield took the degree of B.D. at New College, and held a fellow- 
ship (fifteen were assigned to Winchester men) until 1615. "In those 
days," Mr. George says, "a fellowship was vacated either by marriap;e 
or by presentation to a benefice, or by succession to landed property 

.... He was not compelled to vacate by either of the first two 
reasons .... so that the reasonable inference is that he became pos- 
sessed in 1615 of property, possibly at the death of his father." Be 
this as it may, the presumed reason for the relinquishment of the fel- 
lowship is in accordance with what we otherwise know of Whitfield's 
comparative wealth. Another fact of very great interest is that jNIr. 
Whitfield, dying "at Winchester on 17 September, 1657 was buried in 
the Cathedral." The honor of such a burial for the builder of the Whit- 
field House (who probably had a benefice in Winchester under the 
Puritans), constitutes a second noteworthy association with this great 
English church. The other (later in date though earlier known to 
us) belongs to the monument erected to a Bishop of Winchester who 
died in 1761, Benjamin Hoadly. His father was the Rev. Samuel Hoadly, 
who was born in Guilford, and his grandfather was John Hoadly, a 
fellow settler of Whitfield's and, like him, one of the seven men who 
formed the original Guilford church, perhaps organized under Whit- 
field's roof. 

w. c. A. 



INSCRIPTION 

THIS HOUSE BUILT 

A. D. 1639 

WAS THE HOME 

OF 

REV HENRY WHITFIELD B.D. 

FIRST MINISTER 

AND 

THE LEADER OF THE FOUNDERS 

OF GUILFORD 

IN HONOR OF WHOM 

THIS TABLET IS ERECTED ON THE 

OLDEST STONE HOUSE IN NEW ENGLAND 

BY THE CONNECTICUT SOCIETY 

OF THE COLONIAL DAMES OF AMERICA 

1897 




TABLET PLACED ON THE WHITFIELD HOUSE BY THE CONNECTICUT SOCIETY 

OF THE COLONIAL DAMES OF AMERICA, OCTOBER 20, l8g7. DOOR 

AND WINDOW BELONG TO THE RECONSTRUCTION OF I904. 



TWO MEDICAL WORTHIES GUILFORD KNEW 
IN FORMER DAYS. 

By Walter R. Steiner, M.D., of Hartford, grandson of Hon. Ralph D. 

Smyth, and brother of Bernard, C. Steiner, Ph.D., of 

Baltimore, authors of two histories of Guilford. 

The two histories of Guilford, as well as the addresses at 
the Quarto-Millennial Celebration, and Dr. Andrews' history of 
Christ Episcopal Church, pretty thoroughly exhaust our knowl- 
edge of the early times in this town. There were two men, 
however, somewhat associated with Guilford and this old Stone 
House, whose medical careers have not been sufficiently empha- 
sized. For these worthies were numbered among the most 
eminent physicians of their day in New England. I refer to 
Bryan Rossiter, a former practitioner here, and Governor John 
Winthrop, Jr., who at one time considered buying this house 
we dedicate to-day as a State museum. 

The former came to this country with his father in 1630, 
and was made a freeman, a year later, of Dorchester, Mass. In 
1639 h^ moved to Windsor, Conn., became town clerk there 
and was admitted to practise medicine in the State of Connec- 
ticut by the General Court, "being first tried and approved by 
Mr. Hooker, Mr. Stone and old Mr. Smith of Wethersfield, 
in the face of the said Court." He migrated to Guilford in 
1651, purchasing Samuel Desborow's estate on Water street, 
and became greatly interested in the political affairs of the day, 
at the time when the union of the New Haven Colony with 
Connecticut was being considered. He came into a very large 
practice, as the following extract shows, which was taken from 
a letter he wrote to his daughter and her husband on September 
24, 1669: "We have had a sore visitation again by sickness and 
mortality here in Guilford this summer, as the last. Our graves 
are multiplied and fresh earth heaps are increased. Coffins 
again and again have been carried out of my doors. I have 
taken up a lot amongst the tombs in the midst of them." It 
was during this "visitation" he lost his wife, his daughter and 



54 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

a grandchild. I shall elsewhere refer to his treating Mrs. 
John Higginson, a daughter of Henry Whitfield. 

Rossiter was frequently called to see cases in all parts of the 
State, and some of his trips to Hartford have been recorded. 
In 1659 the court ordered that "Mr. Bray Rosseter for and 
in consideration of his paines, in comeing to and attending Mr. 
Talcot in his sickness, is allowed five pounds, to be paid out 
of ye pub. Treasury." In July, 1663, he probably performed 
the autopsy on Rev. Samuel Stone, who was assistant pastor of 
the First Church of Christ in Hartford. Mather in his Mag- 
nalia thus refers to it : "As for Mr. Stone if it were metaphori- 
cally true (what they proverbially said) of Beza that he had 
no gall, the physicians that opened him after his death found 
it literally true of this worthy man." Rossiter had previously 
prescribed for Stone and had been paid ten pounds for it by the 
town of Hartford, and we also know that Davenport of New 
Haven had endeavored to make Stone take Winthrop's "sov- 
ereigne remedy," Rubila, "but did not find him inclinable, though 
he was burthened in his stomach." 

But more interesting than this is the autopsy Rossiter per- 
formed in Hartford, a year earlier, to ascertain whether the 
child of John Kelly was bewitched. The child was a girl, aged 
eight years, "who was taken in the night following Sunday, 
March 23d, with a violent attack of something like broncho- 
pneumonia. In her delirium she cried out against Goody Ayres 
as choking and afflicting her, and the last words the child spoke 
were to that efifect." Following the superstition of those times, 
both her parents and the townspeople thought that her death 
was due to some preternatural cause. The town, accordingly, 
summoned a jury of six men to inquire of the cause and manner 
of her death. Their findings were so supicious that on the 
same day, that is five days after the child's death. Dr. Rossiter 
performed an autopsy at the grave, and mistook his findings (now 
easily explainable) for something supernatural. His results are 
embodied in a still-existing, clearly described protocol. 

Fortified then by the autopsy, John Kelly and Bethia, his wife, 
testify in open court on May 13, 1662, as to the alleged persecu- 
tions of their child by Goody Ayres, according to the child's 
testimony. They state that the child after eating some hot soup 



TWO MEDICAL WORTHIES GUILFORD KNEW 55 

with the wife of William Ayres, against their wishes, complained 
of pain in her stomach. Her father gave her some angelica root, 
which yielded her "present ease," but the relief was only tem- 
porary, as sometime later she died. Fearing, consequently, an 
indictment. Goody Ayres fled suddenly with her husband, leaving 
their son, aged eight, behind them, as well as all their possessions. 
We know nothing of their subsequent history, but we learn that 
the court allowed Mr. Rossiter on March ii, 1662, "twenty 
pounds in reference to openinge Kellies child and his paynes to 
visit the Dep-Governor and his paynes in visiting and administer- 
ing to Mr. Talcot." 

Rossiter finally moved to Killingworth (now Clinton), but 
soon returned here and died in 1672. There is one of the books 
of his library to be seen in the Trinity College library at Hartford. 

John Winthrop, Jr., followed his father to this country in 
1 63 1, and was shortly thereafter made an assistant in the Mas- 
sachusetts Colony. A year later he led a company of twelve to 
Agawam (now Ipswich), where a settlement was made. In 
about a year he returned to England and received a commission 
to be Governor of the River Connecticut for one year. On 
coming back to America he built a fort at Saybrook, and resided 
there part of that time. Then, making no effort to have the 
commission renewed, he returned to Ipswich, but settled again 
in this State in the spring of 1647, at Pequot (now New Lon- 
don). Eight years later he moved to New Haven. It was 
somewhat prior to this that John Higginson wrote to Win- 
throp, stating that the bearer of the letter told him Winthrop 
"desired to know whether my father Whitfield's house and lots 
was yet to be sould, I thought fitt to give you notice of it," 
Higginson declares, "(knowing that if God make your way 
plaine to come hither, it will be very acceptable to all) that it is 
yet in a capacity to be sold, & yet through his neglect of speak- 
ing sooner, the opportunity is allmost past, for the second day 
come senight my broth. Nath : & cousin Jordan are to take 
their journey for England." They wish consequently to dispose 
of "their occasions" and the house especially. If Winthrop 
"desired to buy it, it will be necessary," Higginson says, "to come 
over the beginning of next week, for I have prevayled with 
my brother Nathaniel to abstaine from any way of disposing of 



56 HISTORICAL PAPERS 

it till Thursday, the next week." It is unfortunate that this man 
of science, by not purchasing the house, was lost to Guilford. 

From New Haven Winthrop was called to dwell in Hartford 
on being elected Governor of Connecticut in 1657. He served 
as Governor one year, then became Deputy Governor on account 
of a law which prevented his re-election. The law being repealed 
the next year, he served continuously as Governor from 1659 
until his death in 1676. 

From his youth up he was devoted to scientific studies and 
was an omnivorous reader of books. His library was one of the 
most extensive in this country, and many of his books may yet 
be seen in the libraries of the New York Society and Yale Uni- 
versity. Alchemy greatly interested him and among his corre- 
spondents were numbered Dr. Robert Child, Sir Kenelm Digby, 
George Storkey and Jonathan Brewster, all of whom had like 
ties. He was also much attached to astronomy and with his 
telescope, which was "but a tube of 3 foote & a half with a 
concave ey-giasse," he was able to see five satellites of Jupiter 
and make other celestial observations. He seemed to enjoy 
especially the association with scientific men. In 1661, when he 
went to England for a third time, he arrived not long after the 
Royal Society for Improving Useful Knowledge was organized. 
On December 1 1 of that year he was proposed for membership 
by William Brereton, afterwards Lord Brereton, and was 
admitted January i, 1662. During this stay in England, he took 
an active part in the society's proceedings, read a number of 
papers on a great variety of subjects and exhibited many curious 
things. 

He came naturally by his liking for medicine, as his father 
had no mean knowledge of this science. We learn, also, that 
his brother Henry's widow "was much employed in her sur- 
gurye and hath very good successe," and his son Wait and 
grandson John had both a laudable knowledge of medicine for 
their times. His patients came mostly from Connecticut, Mas- 
sachusetts and Rhode Island. They were frequently sent to 
him, generally at Pequot or Hartford, but at times he would 
come to see them in consultation with the village doctor, or 
otherwise, when they were too sick to be moved. Some were 
also treated by him by letter without personal inspection. Cotton 



TWO MEDICAL WORTHIES GUILFORD KNEW 57 

Mather says: "Wherever he came still the Diseased flocked 
about him, as if the Healing Angel of Bethesada had appeared 
in the place." 

We know that in Guilford the families of Governor William 
Leete, John Higginson and, probably, John "Megs" were all 
under his care. In 1654 or '55 Higginson writes a most earnest 
letter to Winthrop at Pequot or Hartford, begging him to come 
and see his wife. Higginson does not state what her sickness 
was, but declares "the case is such as cannot be judged without 
ocular inspection." He calls it "a very sad affliction, she being 
in a very dangerous case as Mr. Rosseter (above mentioned) 
and all our neighbours here doe apprehend." He hopes that 
Winthrop's "counsell & help, together with Mr. Rosseter" may 
be the means of preserving her life, "if so it pleas the Lord." 

Governor Leete, also, placed great confidence in Winthrop's 
ability and skill. At one time he writes: "My wife entreats 
some more of your phisick, although she feareth it to have very 
contrary operations on Mr. Rossiter's stomach" — showing that 
professional jealousy existed in those days. Leete's children 
were the cause of much anxiety. In 1658 Leete writes about 
the eye trouble of their youngest child, Peregrine, and later 
of his "starting, & sometimes almost strangling ffitts, like con- 
vulsions, which have more frequently afflicted the infant of 
late than formerly." We are apt to conceive it probable, he 
says, to proceed from more than ordinary painful breeding teeth. 
His eyes seemed to be better from the use of a "glasse of eye 
watter," which was also used on other of the children so that 
"a little further recruit" of the same was desired. 

Peregrine did not, however, monopolize all the family troubles, 
for his sister, Graciana, was a weakly, puny thing and gathered 
strength but very little. Winthrop's treatment seems to have 
caused an improvement, for shortly thereafter she began "to 
slide a chaire before her & walke after it, after her ffeeble 
manner." She caused trouble, however, in the taking of her 
medicine and Leete asks for directions "to make her willing & 
apt to take it; for though it seemes very pleasant of itselfe, yet 
is she grown marvailous awkward and averse from takeing it in 
beer. Wherefore I would entreat you to prescribe to us the 
varyety of wayes in which it may be given soe effectually; wee 



5^ HISTORICAL PAPERS 

doubt els it may doe much lesse good, being given by force onely.'' 
Andrew's "starting fits" as well as a distemper affecting his son 
William's wife demand other letters to Winthrop. Leete, also, 
writes about a weak back, which afflicted a neighbor's child. 

"Mrs. John Megs" was also a probable patient. In 1673 Joseph 
Eliot, Higginson's successor at Guilford, writes John Meigs a 
letter of introduction to Winthrop. In it he asks aid for Meigs' 
wife, who has "a gentle beginning of fits of flatus hypocondriacus 
yt stir upon griefe yet without violence for the present." 

We do not know what remedies Rossiter prescribed, but some 
in Winthrop's pharmacopoeia were most gruesome. One remedy 
highly prized was "my black powder against the plague, small 
pox, purples, all sorts of feavers ; Poyson ; either, by Way of 
Prevention or after Infection." It was made "by putting live 
toads into an earthen pot so as to half fill it and baking and 
burning them 'in the open ayre and not in an house' until they 
could be reduced by pounding first to a brown, and then into a 
black powder." We indeed hope that Winthrop was not so 
foolish as to employ the following remedy for malaria. It was 
sent him by the distinguished Sir Kenelm Digby of England, who 
claims to have had "infallible successe" with it: "Pare the 
patients nayles when the fit is coming on ; and put the parings 
into a litle bagge of fine linon or sarsenet ; and tye that about a 
live eeles neck in a tubbe of water. The eele will dye, and the 
patient will recover. And if a dog or hog eate that eele, they 
will also dye." 

Let us cherish, then, the memory of these two men who as 
general practitioners and consultants employed the healing art 
and labored long and well for suffering humanity.* 

* We are indebted to the late Dr. C. J. Hoadly of Hartford for having 
unearthed the account of Rossiter's autopsy on "Kellies child." In the 
preparation of this paper I have drawn largely from two former articles 
of mine entitled : Some Early Autopsies in The United States, and 
Governor John Winthrop, Jr., of Connecticut, as a Physician. They 
appeared in The Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin during the year 1903. 



TRUSTEES 59 



ORIGINAL TRUSTEES. 

July, 1900. 

(Eight appointed by Governor Lounsbury; the first selectman of 
Guilford a trustee ex-officio.) 

Rev. William G. Andrews, D.D., Guilford, President. 

Rev. George W. Banks, Guilford. 

Mrs. Godfrey Dunscombe, New Haven. 

Hon. Lynde Harrison, New Haven. 

James J. Merwin, Windsor. 

Frederick C. Norton, Bristol. 
Rev. Frederick E. Snow, Guilford, Secretary. 

Joel T. Wildman, Guilford, Treasurer. 

Richard C. Woodruff, Guilford, ex-officio. 



PRESENT TRUSTEES. 

May, 1 91 1. 

Frederick C. Norton, Bristol, President. 

Rev. William G. Andrews, Guilford. 

Mrs. Frank W. Cheney, South Manchester. 

Harry B. Dudley, Guilford, ex-officio. 

Mrs. Godfrey Dunscombe, New Haven. 

Edward C. Seward, New York and Guilford, Sec. and Treas. 

George Dudley Seymour, New Haven. 

Rev. Frederick E. Snow, Guilford. 

Hon. Rollin S. Woodruff, New Haven and Guilford. 



AUG 30J^n^ ' 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 112 068 2 



